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ut she hears the arrangements in her head. “Stuff gets changed, re-arranged. We’re always looking for beauty and if I’ve worked something out on
paper that isn’t beautiful then it won’t be in. It’s an organic process, going away, bringing it back, working out ways together that it can go forward. Each track builds in a different way. Ideal bal- ance and equality is always being upset, it can be a pretty bumpy ride!”
Hunt returns to the current role of improvisation in the band which the Sufi man was so keen for them to embrace. “Things happen spontaneously in rehearsal, whatever the starting point, a riff, a melody, or a traditional tune. There’s some interesting serendipity in how things interrelate.”
Spiro’s relationship with northern English folk tunes and their beginnings as a folk band called The Famous Five from their meeting back at that Bristol pub has been covered in these pages before (fRoots 317/8). And of course traditional folk music is an important element in the band, particularly for Hunt who’s as keen as ever to get those tunes into the pot for the band to re-work in its sparkling, inim- itable way.
“Even though I’m not from the north of England, I find those tunes incredibly moving. One of the things that really gets me about them is the continuity of experi- ence of struggle, pain, whatever, through- out time. I love that idea of a linear journey, that I’m being moved by tunes that are 500 years old: I’m experiencing something that my forebears experienced centuries ago.”
Conveying emotion, conveying human experience, joy, pain, love, sorrow, through music is something that crops up a lot when you’re talking to Spiro. It’s some- thing they pull off. Their label boss Peter Gabriel is on record as saying “This is soul- ful music, passionate music and I love it.”
They say they go for raw emotion first and foremost, which springs from a basic human need for communication. Vann says “instrumental acoustic music is our way of storytelling. Everything we do all the time is about communication, connec- tion: a feeling of belonging with people and the world” At the gig the previous night Hunt had introduced the songs. One about sunshine: “A riff or something is energy, like the riff for Yellow Noise, it’s this explosive bright energy and that mar- ries with something else and the two between them created something bigger which became, in our minds, like the sun.”
Or explaining that they were inspired by Emily Dickinson or Shakespeare. Or what happens to us after we die. They tell me that the concepts develop in tandem with the music “We wouldn’t start off and write a piece about sunshine, it would become about sunshine as it evolved. The great thing about music is that it comes from a place where there are no words: no meanings that we can put words to.”
“With We Will Be Absorbed, we’d made a bit of music that really moved us and calling it that just kind of helped it grow further. Now every time we play it we dedicate it to someone who has died. It grew into being about what happens to our spirit at the end of our life and how it gets re-absorbed into the cosmos.”
piece of music relates to that in what seems a meaningful way to me.” Chris Wood has said he wants We Will be Absorbed played at his funeral, and the band have had several people come up to them claiming it’s had them in floods of cathartic tears.
V
Hunt says he thinks that “The whole drive of the human species is to actually become unified with each other and the universe.” And so I ask “Do you think your music acts as an interface between you and the universe and between your audi- ence and the universe.”
Harbour says: “I often feel on stage that there is an energy flowing and you just don’t know where it started. Did it start in the audience; did it start in the air; did it start in the music; did it start in us? But it rolls like a ball between, and this energy ball gets bigger throughout the gig and it’s like everything, you and the audience, is becoming part of this one energy that’s just growing.”
Hunt adds: “When it’s flying there’s a quite shocking sense of oneness. I was talking earlier about being transported by a wave, it does feel like the band and the audience and where we are is one surge of energy.”
All this talk about energy is very mat-
ter-of-fact. And there was a feeling of transcendence at the gig, possibly helped by the bijou and beautiful festival site, and the warmth and ease of the evening.
ann says: “It’s part of being human to think about those things and to know people who have died and to have feelings about that, and that
Thanks to Focus On The Past, Waterloo St, Clifton, Bristol.
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